When Bluetooth was developed in the late 1990’s, nobody could have imagined how far wireless technology would evolve in the following decades. As we enter the 2020’s, legacy wireless protocols are being stretched beyond their limits in an attempt to squeeze out just a bit more battery life or just a bit more bandwidth or shortened latency. But narrowband RF can only be pushed so far: most of these approaches compromise quality and latency. A new approach is necessary.

The SPARK SR1000 UWB IC family takes full advantage of Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology to simultaneously deliver industry-leading energy efficiency, latency and bandwidth:

• Data rates of up to 10 Mbps @ 1.5 nJ/bit energy efficiency
• 2 mW power consumption while transmitting and receiving 1 Mbps, scaling to 6 uW at 1 kbps
• Ultra-short wireless latency (50 µs for 1 kb)
• Time-of-flight positioning at 30 cm accuracy

The SPARK SR1000 family consists of two products:

• SR1010: 3.1 – 6 GHz Band
• SR1020: 6 – 9.25 GHz Band

Evaluation Kits

The SPARK SR1000 Series Evaluation Kit is meant to demonstrate the capabilities of the SR1010 and SR1020 low power, high data rate radio transceiver family. It allows to benchmark the SR1000 family’s unique qualities in terms of data rate, power consumption, latency according to different configurable presets.

SPARK SR1000 Family Evaluation Kits Features

• Low latency audio streaming demonstrator:
  5 ms latency uncompressed 48 kSps 16-bit stereo
• Wireless link quality statistics
• Power and latency monitoring
• Time-of-flight positioning demonstrator
• Advanced mode for customization
• Battery-less sensor nodes

5 ms Latency Uncompressed Audio Headset Demonstrator

The SPARK Headset audio solution is a complete hardware/software solution built to provide a reliable, low latency and uncompressed high quality audio link. The solution uses the SR1020 ultra-low latency high data-rate wireless transceiver, a NXP SGTL5000 low power stereo codec and a ARM Cortex-M4 based STM MCU running SPARK’s proprietary audio and wireless stack. Specifications include:

• Configurable sampling rate: 24 kHz and 48 kHz
• Configurable latency: 3 ms, 5 ms, 10 ms and 20 ms
• Raw uncompressed 16-bit audio (no compression, no masking)